Board of Trustees of University of Alabama Assigned Patent

Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama, for and on behalf of University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, has been assigned a patent (11,164,642) developed by Ray, Biswajit, and Kumari, Preeti, Huntsville, AL, for “systems and methods for hardening flash memory to radiation.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A method for radiation hardening flash memory performs accelerated aging on the flash memory by program-erase (PE) cycling the flash memory. Such accelerated aging induces trap states in the tunnel oxide layer of the flash memory, which results in improved ionizing radiation tolerance. The number of cycles used to harden a given memory cell is optimally determined in order to limit effects of the radiation hardening on the reliability of the cell.”

The patent application was filed on February 11, 2019 (16/273,062).